Posts Tagged ‘Rick Perry

He seems not to have read the Constitution, especially the part about the separation of church and state.

And what about freedom of religion? Doesn’t that, if one so chooses, also include freedom from religion? Why should some people’s religious celebrations — i.e. Christmas, be forced on every child in the room?

And what does being gay in the military have to do with anything? As far as I know, working next to someone who is gay not only doesn’t make me gay (last I checked it wasn’t contagious), but it doesn’t make me feel badly (other, separate, different) for not being gay. That is not the experience of children being forced to pray — either directly, or through the peer pressure of being the one of few in the room who are not.

And religion, of any sort, is a personal choice, and has no place in a state-run organization.

The article is written in response to the movie “Anonymous,” which claims that Shakespeare’s works were actually written by one Edward de Vere. Of course this is bunk, and I won’t get into that now. But he (Marche) put a couple of things particularly succinctly, and amusingly, which I wanted to share.

This:

You don’t have to be a truther or a birther to enjoy a conspiracy theory. We all, at one point or another, indulge fantasies that make the world seem more dangerous, more glamorous and, simultaneously, much more simple than it actually is. But then most of us grow up. Or put down the bong.

and this:

The original Oxfordian, the aptly named J. Thomas Looney, who proposed the theory in 1920, believed that Shakespeare’s true identity remained a secret because, he said, “it has been left mainly in the hands of literary men.” In his rejection of expertise, at least, Looney was far ahead of his time. This same antielitism is haunting every large intellectual question today. We hear politicians opine on their theories about climate change and evolution as a way of displaying how little they know. When Rick Perry compared climate-change skepticslike himself to Galileo in a Republican debate, I dearly wished that the next question had been “Can you explain Galileo’s theory of falling bodies?” Of all the candidates with their various rejections of the scientific establishment, how many could name the fundamental laws of thermodynamics that students learn in high school? Healthy skepticism about elites has devolved into an absence of basic literacy.

and this:

The Shakespeare controversy, which emerged in the 19th century (at that time, theorists proposed that Francis Bacon was Shakespeare), was one of the origins of the willful ignorance and insidious false balance that is now rotting away our capacity to have meaningful discussions. The wider public, which has no reason to be familiar with questions of either Renaissance chronology or climate science, assumes that if there are arguments, there must be reasons for those arguments. Along with a right-wing antielitism, an unthinking left-wing open-mindedness and relativism have also given lunatic ideas soil to grow in. Our politeness has actually led us to believe that everybody deserves a say.

The problem is that not everybody does deserve a say. Just because an opinion exists does not mean that the opinion is worthy of respect. Some people deserve to be marginalized and excluded. There are many questions in this world over which rational people can have sensible confrontations: whether lower taxes stimulate or stagnate growth; whether abortion is immoral; whether the ’60s were an achievement or a disaster; whether the universe is motivated by a force for benevolence; whether the Fonz jumping on water skis over a shark was cool or lame. Whether Shakespeare wrote Shakespeare is not one of these questions.

Except his net worth is estimated to be between $190 and $250 million. I have a feeling that this is not the case for the majority of the people he was addressing at the time.

Then there’s Mike Huckabee and “Americans should be indoctrinated at gunpoint.”

I might be wrong, but it seems like that might violate several of our civil rights.

Ron Paul would have voted against the civil rights act, and Rick Perry “sleeps well at night” despite the fact that at least one of the more than 240 people executed on death row under his watch was probably innocent.

Bachman has too many to list here, so click here for a list and the explanations.

And then we have Sarah. Ah, Sarah. Where have you been? I must admit I’m a little less angry at the world all the time now that I’m not hearing your whiny, nasally voice on the radio on a daily basis. But you have also failed to provide me, or Tina Fey, with any material for, is it possible?, months now!